The original goal of MISRA was to improve code quality by means of static code checking. That is, code is judged without any level of reflection. The fact is, that human written code can hardly be judged without reflection. Furthermore, the overwhelmingly strict standards tend to add a huge amount of visual noise into code that is otherwise safe and sound. Changes done to code due to MISRA tend to introduce new, hard to find errors.

On the other hand, MISRA compliance is often required by the uninformed management league that needs some type of quantifiable data. Requiring MISRA, though, causes a huge amount of extra work to be done with a value add that is at best zero.

Prohibiting the imposition of MISRA helps to avoid the negative impact of this standard on the European Software Industry. Today, there are much more sophisticated means to ensure code quality, such as Unit Tests and tools that reflect on code. There is no need for MISRA.